It's A Boy!

Getting up to work out at 5:30 in the a.m. more often than not ends up with me hitting the snooze button on the alarm a couple of times.  Then I remembered there was a butterfly about to birth.  Nothing like the right motivation.

My timing was perfect.  Here is the sequence of events.

You can barely see it, but if you look at the lower left wing, you can see a spot in the vein. This indicates it's a male.

Monarch Butterflies

Monarch Butterflies, a set on Flickr.

Photostream of the butterlies

Butterflies are Free!

You can see his wings

I went to bed on Friday night feeling anxious. One of the monarch chrysalis' was changing.  The wings could be seen beneath the pale green of its cocoon. I didn't want to miss watching the butterfly burst forth from its shell, but it was late and I was tired.

small wings, large body

Still, I was up early on Saturday, checking on my butterfly's progress. Happily, he was still in his shell.  In the short time it took me to feed the dog, he had begun to emerge.

wings are uncurling, getting larger

At first his wings seemed much to small and I worried that he was deformed in some way.  I took him outside into the sunshine. He began to move his wings, opening them, soaking up the warm morning air.  He sat on my finger, weightless, his feet sticky.




I went into the house and found another of the butterflies had emerged from her chrysalis.  I had two of them now.






They both hung on the bird feeder for awhile and then, worrying that a bird might think they looked too enticing, I moved them to the garden.  And that's where they stayed until they flew away.  They're both females, so I hope they'll soon mate and lay more eggs in my garden.

Free at last

Life With Monarchs

This morning I missed watching one of my monarchs transform into its chrysalis.  When I shuffled into the kitchen this morning, he was the same as I left him last night: hanging upside down from a twig.  The one difference was that his little mouth parts were moving as if munching on an imaginary leaf.  Do caterpillars dream?

An hour letter I checked on him once more before walking out the door and to my amazement he was now a little jade capsule with gold trim.  I had totally missed the change.  I had absolutely no idea they could change that quickly.

I also learned that they can move quickly.  Returning home from work, I counted only three caterpillars on the milkweed plants I had potted indoors.  I was missing one.  I looked around at my feet, afraid that he had fallen and I had stepped on him.  Or maybe the dog had eaten him.  Thankfully, I found him on the underside of the kitchen table.

First Tiger Lily

First lily of the season

Found this big guy this morning.  Don't know how I missed him.

This morning my bed of tiger lilies were all buds waiting to burst. This evening one of them had opened.  I always love the first blooms.

Meanwhile, I have counted four milkweed plants with caterpillar activity.  And as many times as I check on them, I was surprised to find a really big guy on one of the leaves.

There are also the disappointments. Seeing signs of caterpillar presence and then not finding anything.  Ants like to eat eggs and larvae and will take it back to their own nests to feed their colony. Spiders and Asian lady beetle larvae and adults also take their toll.

Yep, that's caterpillar poop!

How do I know there were monarch caterpillar's present?  The state of the milkweed is a sure sign.  If there are holes in the leaves, a caterpillar has been munching. And the bigger the holes, the larger the caterpillar.  Caterpillar droppings are also quite evident the larger they get.

With all this concentrating on the caterpillar, I need to start thinking of planting some more nectar plants for the adult butterflies to feed on.  If it ever stops raining long enough to plant something!